Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anne Finch
-
Standard Name: Finch, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Kingsmill
Married Name: Anne Finch
Titled: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
Pseudonym: Ardelia
Pseudonym: Areta
Pseudonym: a Lady
Used Form: Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea
AF
is an important poet of the Restoration and early eighteenth century—highly versatile and original. She wrote in many genres: fables (a high proportion of her poems, giving scope to her humour and complexity), closet drama, elegies, political, religious, personal, and proto-feminist pieces, and a notable pindaric ode which was her single most famous publication. She sometimes wrote satire, though she was sensitive to its potential for harm. She both printed a selection of her poems and carefully preserved her oeuvre in handsome manuscript form.
Hertford later included poems of her own composition in her letters to Rowe
and to Lord Winchilsea
, widower of the poet Anne Finch
. She exchanged verse, too, with Frederick, Prince of Wales
...
Textual Production
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
It was in this year that Lord Winchilsea
told Lady Hertford how pleased his late wife (the poet Anne Finch
) would have been with her achievement. At about the same period Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Friends, Associates
Ephelia
If Ephelia's poems of compliment are taken to imply personal friendship, she may have been a friend of Aphra Behn
, whom she praises warmly and with polite humility about her own abilities in her...
Reception
Ephelia
In the late nineteenth century H. B. Wheatley
suggested in Samuel Halkett
and John Laing
's A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain that Ephelia was somebody called Joan Phillips. This...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Elstob
An early friendship that EE
regarded as important was that with Mary Randolph
of Canterbury. Randolph was in the unusual position of having a mother (who apparently shared the same name) who was very...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Elstob
EE
's preliminary list of names suggests considerable research work: it includes several ancient or Anglo-Saxon women as well as Mary Astell
, Anne Bacon
, Katherine Chidley
(as the pamphlet antagonist of Thomas Edwards
Publishing
Elizabeth Elstob
Its full title is An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory
, Anciently used in the English-Saxon Church. Giving an Account of the Conversion of the English from Paganism to Christianity. It...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Elstob
Begun in order to help the work of a female student, this work reiterates more strongly EE
's plea for opening the arena of scholarship to women. For examples of poetic practice she turns to...
Friends, Associates
Sarah Dixon
There is some evidence to suggest that SD
may have known Anne Finch
: may have been, in fact, one of the circle of female poets of Kent whom Finch celebrated in verse; she and...
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 79-80
She gives one epistle a kind of doggerel title: Advice to a Rev'rend Cleric, Near his grand climacteric, That...
Textual Production
Mary Delany
Mary Pendarves (later MD
) expressed anxiety that she might be thought (by a man) to set up for a poet, and that is a character I detest, unless I was able to maintain it...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Whateley Darwall
The earliest extant poems by MWD
are carefully crafted to show her skill and her familiarity with canonical poets. Most of her exemplars are male. In Rural Happiness she echoes Anne Finch
: a female...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Whateley Darwall
Besides Female Friendship (a vigorous defence of women's capacity for generous constancy) MWD
addressed two poems in 1766 to a Scottish friend, Mrs Hewan
. She wrote a few family pieces, including expressions of anguish...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Conway
AC
never knew her father, Sir Heneage Finch
, who had been Speaker of the House of Commons.
Conway, Anne et al. The Conway Letters. Editor Hutton, Sarah, Clarendon Press.
4
He was a cousin (not a close one) of the poet Anne Finch
's husband.
